Judging from his latest release, pianist Sheng Cai has been honing his craft and his artistry over the years. His approach to Rachmaninov’s Moments Musicaux and Second Sonata presents equal degrees of powerful assurance and classical reserve, radically differing from the volatile subjectivity of Kariné Poghosyan’s recent recordings of these same works.
The brooding expansiveness we often hear in the B minor Moment Musical (No. 3) is replaced by an almost Brahmsian transparency, with cogently shaped bass lines. No. 2’s swirling figurations are coiled and controlled, in contrast to Horowitz’s molten lava. Cai unfolds No. 5 steadily, achieving expressive variety by keeping the ostinato left-hand accompaniment, treble melodies, and middle inner voices in three-dimensional perspective.
Tightly held yet never rigid rhythms and discreet pedaling cut through the 1913 Second Sonata edition’s padding and baby fat, and make the score sound far less sprawling than usual. By contrast, Cai’s insouciant rubatos and coruscating accents in the Polka de V.R. channel the spirit of Shura Cherkassky, if not the latter’s creamy tone.
However, Cai’s sound and expressive palette truly open up in his brilliant transcriptions of four pieces from the composer’s youthful one-act opera Aleko. The Men’s Dance in particular is a bacchanalian tour-de-force whose madcap accelerandos give those of George Cziffra a run for their money, while the lyrical Intermezzo is clothed in deliciously garish runs up and down the keyboard. I suspect there’s more dynamism and heft to Cai’s sonority than the clear and clean engineering conveys. In all, a superb release.
